Good morning my Glibs and Gliberinas! And what a beautiful morning it always is!
Supreme Court sides with student athletes over NCAA.
South Park can’t even satirize this.
AZ audit winding down. Paper examination to end Saturday.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them.
Japan to cap their Olympic spectators at 10,000 and allow only Japanese residents.
CA to use $100 million to assist their marijuana industry in overcoming their arduous regulations.
CA to also pay off unpaid rent accumulated during forced lockdowns.
Lockdowns that didn’t reduce deaths.
That’s all I got for today. I’ll leave you with a song and move along with my day.
whaddup doll-face
I’m going to assume you’re talking to me. Good morning!
Im unsupervised for the next 2 weeks. So, any port in a storm.
How YOU doin’ ?
I though Jugsy was back home?
Only for the weekend.
Shipped her back out to the jungles of NYC for another fortnight.
Derived from several packages of financial aid distributed to states and localities by Congress, California has roughly $5.2 billion at the ready — an amount that Jason Elliott, a senior counselor to Gov. Gavin Newsom on housing and homelessness, said should be more than enough to cover unpaid rents, according to the Associated Press.
“Sure, what the hell. It’s not my money.”
Can I back not-pay?
^This. The Chump Effect writ large.
Spend it now or wipe your ass with it later.
Start your search with figure skaters.
I think Caster Semenya was found to be intersex when she was finally forced to submit to testing.
Not sure what exactly to do in those cases. Fortunately they are quite rare.
You treat those cases as exceptions to be ruled on individually.
Otherwise, the standard rules apply.
Oddly, not her porn name…
Caster Semenonya would have been perfection.
I would say male levels of hormones = male for competition
Female levels of hormones = female for competition
And testosterone levels should be the driving factor.
Or just flip a coin. These situations are so vanishingly rare I can’t fathom spending much time on it.
Yeah. If they’ve been living their life as a woman, and they’re intersex, how is that different than being Yao Ming? Everyone knows that Chinese people are short, but we wouldn’t exclude him because he’s a freak.
That still poses a problem in that those who developed with testosterone have significant physical advantages over those who did not.
And that’s not to mention that I have no interest in helping to promote transgender hormone treatment and the permanent physical damage it’s doing to young people.
Not that I’m a big sports person — so don’t care that much, but why not something like the boxing weight class system? Don’t know exactly how you set the metrics — but basically have ranges of performance — if you’re in that range, you compete with others in that range regardless of body type / actual gender, etc. Set the range boundaries sufficient such that men-acting-as-women can’t easily be just at the top of the range, and I would think this would sort itself out. (Well, other than locker rooms, probably… in which case, like bathrooms — just go with individual stalls with doors/showers?)
Probably won’t work for some reason — but seems a fair solution to me if it would.
USPSA has a classification system that pits shooters of different abilities against people within their performance class. Everybody shoots the same match, but D class shooters don’t compete against GMs directly–they’re ranked among classes. Movement between classes is based on average scores over a number of matches within divisions. Once you move up a class, you can’t go back down unless you make a special petition backed up by medical or other evidence. I can’t see a reason why something like that couldn’t be used in most individual competitive sports.
But, considering what one has to do to get an Olympic spot, you’re already talking about some of the best athletes in the world, so they’ve already been classified to the highest level.
One caveat: there are no prizes for winning D class. You have to be at least C class to get a prize above your overall ranking.
And that prize will undoubtedly be a 12oz bag of Black rifle Coffee.
Back in the early-to-mid 2000s, I was shooting at the high-C class level. I shot at the Limited Nationals, and my scores were in the mid-B class range for that match, and the Nationals score was weighted heavily enough in the classification system that it catapulted me from mid-C to low-mid-B class. So I had to up my game to continue to be competitive in my new class.
There’s something about the way classifications are calculated, but it seems to me that there a serious difference in ability between C and B shooters. I routinely beat C shooters, but I’ve scored higher than a B shooter on exactly one stage ever.
It takes a lot of practice to get from C to B. Once you’re in B, you’re primed to do the work to go to A. Then M is not too bad. A friend of mine took 2 or 3 years to get to A, then made M and GM in Limited within a year.
It is possible to get a GM classification by simply practicing classifier stages, but then your scores suck. But some people (few, really) just want to be able to say they are classified high, and don’t care about match scores.
Something has changed for the better this year. Instead of things happening in slow-motion, it feels like everything is happening in normal time, but the clock is showing less time has elapsed than I thought. I used to get some decent to good scores by pushing for as fast as I could go and occasionally getting lucky, now I feel like I’m taking time before/between shots and that I could push much harder, but my times are faster. I can only conclude that I’m actually thinking faster than I used to.
Have you gotten to the point yet where you see the slide cycle and follow the front sight all the way because so see so much faster? When you’re capable of that, stuff falls into place.
Probably won’t work for some reason
Because then it becomes a well populated men’s division, a well populated women’s division, and a division with 4 trannies who can’t hack it in the men’s division but are physically stronger/faster/whatever than the women.
XX or XY. Boom. Non negotiable.
Stanisława Walasiewicz
That is a very unhappy person. Poor Stan.
That’s why Gavin thinks he’s going to survive his recall. He’s got a shit-ton of tax revenue to bribe people with. A couple of billion on the homeless, 100 million to ease the pain he inflicted on pot shops, another few billion to pay people’s rent, eventually we’ll realize that he’s just like Santa Clause and love him again. Might even work. He want the election to happen while all that money is getting doled out, of course.
I’m just waiting for the checks to come with a pre-filled out absentee ballot to retain Gavin.
With some editing, could be Bee material
“Sign these two things – the back of the check, and the pre-filled absentee ballot attestation.”
[golf clap]
And it’s going to work, unless the power grid goes down. Rolling blackouts are what got California Arnold.
Summer is here so we will find out soon.
Gavin Newsome is an infrastructure.
Something something low expectations.
It starts with participation trophies and ends with being operated on by someone who always wanted to be a doctor but couldn’t actually do the coursework.
Obligatory.
You talk like a fag and your shit is all retard, scro….
I lurned how to be a doktor by play’n OPERASHUN!
I can’t remember if I told the story here or not, but I visited a relative in the hospital once and he had a room mate that was not melanin-challenged and looked to be in real bad shape. While there, my relative had an Asian doctor that had been in to see em drop by to chat about an impending surgery. After the doctor left, the rest of us were chatting when a black young man came in and introduced himself to the relative’s roommate as his doctor. The young man a big smile on his face – I suspect it was cause he was helping a brotha and expected to be greeted with a “right on!” – only to have that smile destroyed by the patient when he told the young black doctor that his life was in the balance and that he wanted a white or Asian doctor, cause he was not going to take a risk with an affirmative action candidate.
Everyone visiting the relative, and the relative, choked and all talking died off. The young doctor left with anger on his face, and last we knew, the relative’s roommate got the same Asian doctor as the relative, and he made it, but that experience left a few more left leaning relatives feeling like someone had pissed in their progressive lunch bowl…
We’ll get the money from Scrooge McDuck- he’s got way more than he deserves
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki pushed back against a gas tax proposal under consideration in the Senate, as she argued that ramping up IRS enforcement would net more revenue.
At a Monday press conference, Psaki said the administration had projected that the bipartisan group’s planned gas tax measure would raise around $40 billion in revenue.
The Biden administration is pushing to pour $80 billion into the IRS as part of its infrastructure plans. The White House views it as a key way to generate new revenue from wealthy Americans who pay little or nothing in federal taxes every year.
She said additional tax enforcement “would raise a great deal more, by multiples of what the gas tax would raise,” while she also noted “it would fall on predominantly wealthy Americans and just ensure they’re paying the taxes they owe.”
A March study from IRS researchers and academics indicated that the top 1% of Americans fail to report about a quarter of their income to the IRS. Then underreporting incomes is twice as high for the top 0.1%, the research found.
Top Men.
And Womynz.
If it’s not reported, how do they know? Sounds like a bullshit study to me.
Dude. It’s the government. They’re just looking out for your best interest. Have you accepted government into your heart?
wealthy Americans who pay little or nothing in federal taxes every year
Starting with those who make $200k or more a year, and continuing for all higher income levels as well, a greater proportion of income tax is paid than the proportion of income received. The average effective tax rate on all reported income in the U.S. in 2018 was 18.3%. All income levels below $200k pay less than that, all income levels above $200k pay more. 20% of all households pay 80% of all income taxes, and less than 6% of all households pay 60% of all income taxes.
The statement I quoted is such a blatant but widely believed lie that it is sometimes amazing to behold.
It’s almost like it is a Große Lügen that some bad man wrote about.
But that Bezos guy, and the other outliers!
There’s only one “legitimate” reason to go after Bezos, Gates, et al. and it’s not to raise revenue, since forcing them to sell their assets to pay the tax would immediately devalue those assets to fire-sale prices (and even if it somehow didn’t get devalued, $100 billion one time is not that much to a government that takes in $1.8 trillion per year in income tax alone). It’s to take away their means. There is of course a certain populist appeal to doing that, but besides the ensuing capital flight and disincentive that it would create, there’s the more important question of who wields such power. The man, woman, or gender nonbinary they who gets to break the Bezoses and Gateses of the world would be no less than a dictator, if not in title then at least in actual effect.
The price drop due to a forced liquidation wouldn’t even hurt Gates/Bezos the most – it is how it would hit all of the smaller shareholders, like me.
It’s true that at a net worth of $1 billion instead of $100 billion they’d still be very rich indeed. But they wouldn’t be able to buy so much land, they wouldn’t get quite as much access to the media, the government, and the nonprofits, etc.
However, at a broader level, you’re right that the knock-on effects would hit a lot of other people. Of course, to a populist, you and I are part of the problem too. To somebody who’s never owned a house, inflating property prices are a problem not a boon. To somebody who’s never had a 401k, inflating stock prices are the same.
40 billion to Big Daddy Gubmint is like a five dollar bill to you and me. But any way to tighten those screws, right?
“bipartisan group’s planned gas tax measure would raise around $40 billion in revenue.”
Why do they hate poor people?
“South Park can’t even satirize this.”
So which one of you degenerates would?
Blackface’s emergency order expires somewhere around the end of the month. Masking without the advice of a licensed physician or osteopath and carrying on his person an affidavit from the physician or osteopath specifying the medical necessity for wearing the device and the date on which the wearing of the device will no longer be necessary and providing a brief description of the device will be a felony.
I’m having a hard time parsing that.
Sounds like the old fashioned “no masks in public because you will be assumed to be up to no good” policy would be back in effect?
Virginia has an anti-mask law. It is a felony to wear a mask to conceal your identity with a few exceptions. Why are there exceptions if intent to conceal is a requirement? A declared health emergency is one exception. A doctor’s note is another. Pre-COVID, there were arrests and prosecutions for otherwise non-criminal masking. I don’t believe there have been convictions, but it is an unnecessary law. If they can prove intent to conceal for a crime, can’t they prove intent to commit the crime?
Okay
The language is unnecessarily obtuse, of course.
For some reason, I think the only people that will be prosecuted will be the ones with CCLs or open carrying.
“can’t they prove intent to commit the crime?”
Sounds like work is involved. So no.
I assume they have to make some allowances for female Muslim garb that covers the face.
I don’t think there should be an exception for such garb, but I have no doubt that saying a woman can’t wear a niqab into a bank is some form of Islamophobia.
They’ll make allowances that are in the best interest of the state. It’s like so many laws that can be used to harass undesirables.
You would think so, but no, there are no religious exemptions.
It makes sense though, when you consider that the purpose of the law is to ensure the comfort of wimpy upper-class white leftists. Nothing makes a yuppie soyboi more uncomfortable than a woman covering her face in public out of a sense of modesty and religious obligation…
I might argue that it’s both “Islamophobic” (or whatever label you feel okay about), AND misogynist.
All this law does is make sure that Islamic women in VA will not have the ability to bank. Without economic freedom there is no freedom.
I’m not religious at all, but I do hold a very healthy level of respect for religion and religious practices. They’re not to be fucked with.
I’m not exactly sure how to get around the obvious: baddies with bad intent using a niqab solely as a means to conceal oneself during the commission of a crime, except to say freedom has consequences. And I’m good with that.
Let’s try that link again
Psaki also said during the news conference the administration opposes a new charge for electric vehicle drivers — which most Republicans support — because it wants to spur growth in that industry. Electric cars only make up 2% of new cars and 1% of all cars on American roads, The New York Times reported.
“The president wants to grow the electric vehicle industry, wants more people to buy electric vehicles, wants to make them accessible to people across the country,” she said. “That will help our climate [and] help create jobs in that industry as well.”
Dementia. It’s not just for old people.
Now, how about upgrading the power grid to accommodate all of those new electric vehicles.
Yes, they will need money for that too.
And some more coal and oil power plants to supply the power.
“Electric cars only make up 2% of new cars and 1% of all cars on American roads,”
The market works?
And everyone who has an electric car, has a gas vehicle, probably a SUV, parked next to it for non-virtue signalling days.
What if I can’t find a single fuck about what the president wants me to drive?
That motherfucker doesn’t drive around for me, so he can kiss my ass.
Japan to cap their Olympic spectators at 10,000 and allow only Japanese residents
We were actually seriously contemplating going this year if they had opened it up. Sister in law and her husband (and soon to be born kiddo) live over there. *shrug*
“Man, those s̵a̵m̵o̵a̵n̵s̵ Japanese sure are a s̶u̶r̶l̶y̶ racist bunch.”
Between the exclusion of the faithful Olympic tourists (they exist) and making a mockery of women’s sports by allowing mediocre male athletes in to moonlight as chicks, this might be the end of Olympic Games.
Winning the games was already a white elephant for the host city. If they can’t even operate at capacity, who will want the next games???
The “city fathers” somewhere will. Why would they care if they have to fleece a bunch of the tax cattle?
If their city gets the Olympics, they will get to rub shoulders with a lot of important people. They will also get to go to a ton of hospitality suites and other soirees. It is all good for them.
The Olympics were always a loss but can you imagine the buckets of money Japan is going to lose?
Here covid basically doesn’t exist now. Is the same not true of Japan?
AZ audit winding down.
I only hear about this when democrat lawmakers whine about it. Have they smartened up and stfu in order to get it to fly under the radar? I think there’s practically zero chance anything comes of this unless some epic open mouth and insert foot action occurs.
Avery Brundage was a Class A asshole, but he would have strangled this transgender idiocy in its bassinet.
It is super easy, allow any genders to compete, but divide by biological sex.
Then you only have to make a call on the rare xxy athlete and etc. And I think for them, it is easy…the two categories are “has a Y” and “no Y”.
Immediately thought of this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u03M-KJlYII
CA to use $100 million to assist their marijuana industry in overcoming their arduous regulations.
If the government was in charge of the Sahara Desert in ten years there would be a shortage of sand.
… if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Why not just cut back on the reg..ah, fuck it…
This is the way you troll?
OFFS!!
Fap fap fap
President Rodrigo Duterte threatened to jail people who refuse to be vaccinated against the coronavirus as the Philippines battles one of Asia’s worst outbreaks, with over 1.3 million cases and more than 23,000 deaths.
“You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,” Duterte said in a televised address on Monday following reports of low turnouts at several vaccination sites in the capital Manila.
There’s a man who takes public health seriously. Foochy approves.
A latte liberal’s dilemma. I’m supposed to be pro ICC, but not if it is whites punching down on browns.
A real minister of love.
And this, kids, is why populists can’t be trusted.
Yeah, they may be fighting your enemies for now, but they’ll turn on you in half a heartbeat.
Interesting. WHO says people under 18 should not be vaccinated.
If it’s not reported, how do they know? Sounds like a bullshit study to me.
According to my model, you’re stealing from the government.
Caption for the lead photo on the Olympic link:
Wasn’t that the lift that broke Laurel’s arm? It looks pretty twisty in the photo.
Ouch.
As far as Laurel Hubbard goes, it seems like people on both sides of the argument are being pretty shitty–saying things like “Laurel Hubbard isn’t the face of transgender in women’s sports” and “Do you really want Laurel Hubbard leading your charge?”
They don’t care about the individual at all, only how they can serve the collective.
Croatia-Scotland match today is straight-forward. Winner advances, loser goes home. Tie and both go home and Ukraine advances. Ukraine has 2 more chances to get off the bubble tomorrow, but this one is easy to understand.
Go Cro-ats!
(I just like their World Cup checkerboard kit design)
Good morning, Banjos!
Thanks for the lynx and the music. They were local to me, but I never saw them. Too bad for me!
Men shouldn’t compete against women. That shouldn’t even need to be said. But, since Zuby said it best…
Good article from FEE. It still astonishes me that I know more people – personally – who died from overdose and suicide than who were hospitalized or killed by the ‘vid.
I hope y’all have a great day. Sunny and gorgeous here in the People’s Republic!
I feel like Superman.
As far as deaths, I know several pneumonia deaths from people who probably caught pneumonia due to masking and having compromised breathing. One of the few Covid deaths was a daughter’s friend’s grandfather. We had to watch her while her mom flew to NY to bury her father. He was a NY nursing home victim.
Better Superman.
link – https://youtu.be/fUT9KQ-LuaU
Just for you Tundra, I am posting this
https://www.instagram.com/p/CKO-eJCpIzh/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading
You are an amazing and thoughtful person, zwak.
Thank you.
She is up there with Elizabeth Hurley as an utterly improbably hot mid-50 year old. She loves to post her some bikini pics, god bless her.
Spoke to my local delegate to the state house this weekend.
My question was what the priorities would be if the GOP managed to take back the house in Virginia this year. After some discussion of lesser items, I suggested that they should put neutering the governor’s office at the top of the list.
Surprisingly, she agreed and indicated that the state senate, even though it is Democrat controlled, would be onboard with doing that. There are enough crossover votes to get it done.
That sounds promising! Good for you getting in her face about the issue!
Terror at thirty thousand feet
Organizations representing airlines and workers sent letters to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday urging stricter enforcement and consequences for violent passengers after a year of increased incidents.
Together, corporations and their workers are requesting the Department of Justice and Federal Aviation Administration push for “public prosecution” of passengers who act violently onboard flights. The letter was sent by 10 different organizations, including Airlines for America, Allied Pilots Association, Transport Workers Union of America, and Association of Professional Flight Attendants.
“Specifically, the federal government should send a strong and consistent message through criminal enforcement that compliance with federal law and upholding aviation safety are of paramount importance,” the letter said.
They later added that the enforcement should be “consistent and vigorous” by sending egregious cases to federal prosecutors.
A separate letter was sent from Airlines for America to FAA Administrator Steve Dickson, thanking him for his commitment to inflight safety but also urging the agency to push for more strict punishments. Though the FAA has pushed for a “zero tolerance” policy for unruly passengers, it appeared many passengers have still not gotten the message, the organization wrote.
“Unfortunately, we continue to see onboard behavior deteriorating into heinous acts, including assaults, threats and intimidation of crewmembers that directly interfere with the performance of crewmember duties and jeopardize the safety and security of everyone onboard the aircraft,” Airlines for America said.
Just kick them off.
The message people should be getting is, “Fuck flying, I quit. Let the stewardesses starve.”
Over-under on air travel getting nationalized? Buses and passenger trains used to be private, after all.
Aeroflot!
I was thinking the same thing.
The pinnacle of safety and passenger conformity.
I’ll give old school socialists and trades unionists the limited credit that they were almost completely honest about the purpose of their endeavors: jobs. You don’t nationalize something to provide a better service; you nationalize it to keep (your) people employed.
Or to use it as a cudgel against undesirables, eg kulaks.
Slim to none in my opinon. What we will see I think is mission creep with TSA into the aircraft itself and even though db pointed it out that the pilot has ultimate authority, I can see some stupid regulations that actually give the TSA grunt authority on the plane.
Thank you George W. Bush for the gift of the TSA.
The pilot in command of an aircraft has ultimate authority over the safety of a flight (extending to its passengers). It is well within his or her authority to divert the flight to the nearest suitable airport and have the passenger removed.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9711161/Female-mob-TWERK-ambulance-crowd-celebrating-Juneteenth-scene-shooting.html
*quietly cheers on the delta variant*
I got nuthin’
Blacks life don’t really matter?
Sure people are dead but dat ass though.
Seriously though, we fell over the precipice into the Grand Canyon of stupid a while back and we’re not getting out anytime soon.
Obviously the work of white supremacists.
Daniel. Patrick. Moynihan.
Superman
Excellent.
Waitin’ for Superman
From Yusef’s story thread, but it may be of interest to those reading here:
I know a few American pilots–who were originally US Airways (and its predecessors) pilots.
As I understand it from the way I have been told, the way the merger was done, there is essentially a two tiered system where the American pilots union absolutely screwed over the US Air pilots in a number of ways, but especially in seniority. So pilots that came to the merger from American get primacy. There was some concession to US Air pilots where like 100 bids were “protected” for their most senior pilots to have a token group in the high realms of the seniority list, but as I understand it, all other USAir pilots rank lower than American pilots when applying for bids.
Anyway, apparently, as part of the merger, this protected group was guaranteed through 12/31/2020. But when some USAir pilots got sweet bids (a friend of mine was awarded a 787 left-seat bid after flying the A320, A330 and 777) awarded late last year, THEIR OWN UNION filed a grievance against American for awarding the bids to USAir pilots. It went to Federal arbitration and the arbitrator decided that August 2020 was as good as December 2020. So bids that went to former USair pilots between August and January were rescinded and reawarded to American legacy pilots.
How does union leadership survive that? No, I don’t just mean getting kicked out of the leadership slot – I mean how do they not get killed for that?
That’s the bad thing about getting old – the disincentive to kill someone so deserving of death diminishes. Sure life in prison at 30 will keep you in line, but you kick over 60 and it’s like I don’t really have all that much to lose anymore.
We’re hiring! Anyone interested in jobs in The Woodlands? Not the Houston suburb, the Singapore one.
Sorry, I like chewing gum on occasion.
I’m still pissed off that I didn’t get the six weeks there that I was promised when I took this job.
But yeah, too many things about my preferred lifestyle would prohibit me from actually living there.
JFC, Houston at least has a few months a year when the humidity isn’t miserable.
Sure. Where do I send my CV ?
I actually turned down a well-paying job because it required me to re-locate to W. Pennsylvania.
Tres Sr. is 82, and Ver. 2.0 is a teen, so now isnt the best time for me to move 5 hours away.
sgtalentacquisition@globalfoundries.com
There are 20 jobs open, five managerial/paper pushing and the others that have at least some real-world interfacing, even if you’d spend most of your time at a keyboard (tank farm engineering, automation, etc.) There is a surveyor’s job open, which has got to be the cushiest variant of that profession I’ve even seen since they work indoors.
I may know someone. Any website details you can share?
It looks like the details are on an internal sharepoint, so I probably shouldn’t. However they’re all over — specific process modules, facilities, planning, yield enhancement, etc.
So, I have my conversation with my boss this morning about my work location. It doesn’t matter right now, since I’m working from home. But, in 2022, I’ve been told I’ll have to spend some time in the office. I’m planning to suggest Charlotte. I can drive out and spend a day or two in a hotel per week. I don’t plan on going back to NY.
My employer is experiencing the same issue. In fact, they are freaking out because they sent a communication out telling people they are expecting everyone to start coming back in the office at the end of September, and that it now will be shared desks, and they got so much flack from people that the thing looks like it is snowballing into a giant disaster. Some people have already pointed out they will quit if forced to go back in.
Are they covid scared?
Not sure, but they just don’t want to commute, pay for parking, and deal with the hassle of shared desk all so the managers that want to go back into the office can get time away from their families….
At least my company has said we can work partially at home. Their aim is to have the average across the 90% of the company they’ve dubbed “hybrid flex” working in the office 3 days a week. Like I said, if I have to go to Charlotte a couple of days a week, I can live with it. It’s silly. I really didn’t need to be in the office to do my work even before the Great Rona Lockdown. Honestly, I think a lot of corporate America misgauged the whole thing. I think they thought people would be eager to go back to the office and a lot of people just aren’t feeling it. Maybe I sound cynical, but I think it’s because a lot of people making these plans are HR people, probably the most extroverted people in corporate America. They didn’t realize that, for a lot of us, working from home was an opportunity to do our jobs without dealing with them.
Our senior leadership had HR survey all employees about remote work. The overwhelming response (including from the senior leadership) is that very few people want to come back to the office. The ones who do seem mostly to be middle managers who like to look out their office doors and see people in cubicles, so they can buttonhole someone and hand them more work. Most of the managers, though (me included), have adjusted well to managing remote employees.
Our costs have gone down and sales have remained level or improved slightly. Interestingly, the one group in our company that seems to want to go back to the office is the sales and marketing group–the commercial people love to try to drag everyone into their orbits and it’s harder to do that when no one’s in the office.
The company I work for opened up a Q&A site for people to provide them with questions before a planned meeting where they want to discuss their “Return to work plan”, and shut the site down 2 days later, because every question of the 2250+ they had gotten in that timeframe was “WTF, and why do we need to do this?”.
My favorite excuse provided by leadership was “Zoom fatigue”. They felt this was a good rationale to convince people to come into the office. They got hammered by people pointing out the Zoom fatigue was from having almost double the amount of meetings we had when we met in person because now people didn’t have to spend time going to conference rooms or chatting outside them after/before meetings. And the fact that they expected people in conference rooms to social distance still for a while, kind of killed that idea. Also note that practically every employee they hired during Kung Flu was not in a city where the company had an office, so these people will be ALWAYS working offsite.
The only reason I can think of for me going back into the office is so I can take a few hours to go work out at the gym and avoid stupid people in stupid meetings…
It’s interesting how some senior management teams differ on remote work. Ours (except for one EVP) are in favor of it. Sounds like yours are solidy against. Is it management style? Some of it in our company may be due to the fact that we have operations spread all over the country anyway, and many of us work “remotely” from different locations already, and have been doing so for long periods of time. That’s mostly on the manufacturing side, whereas our core commercial group is at the home office, and have relatively fewer remote workers, and those are more traditional sales and customer facing applications engineers.
It’s interesting how some senior management teams differ on remote work.
There’s a lot of apples, oranges, and kumquats in that basket.
We never had meaningful remote work, across the whole organization, because you simply cannot have more than a small fraction of hospital employees work remotely. Even in those areas where remote work is a possibility, we made the decision that some positions should come in anyway (senior management), because the optics of front-line workers nose-to-nose with COVID positive patients while we cooled our heels at home was terrible. For other areas where we had remote work, our experience with productivity was mixed, but it was always a pretty small sample.
My wife’s job told her everyone needs to come back in.
After a year of 1. higher productivity, and 2. being much closer to the mythical “work-life balance”, she’s not having that shit.
So she’s in the market for a new job that is remote.
California’s legislature recently approved a $100-million plan to boost the Golden State’s struggling legal marijuana industry, which is floundering under an oppressive tax and regulatory climate.
“If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, tax it some more. If it stops moving, subsidize it.”
If you can’t make money selling drugs you’re doing it wrong.
California managed to legalize MJ and still make a black market in it attractive. You almost have to admire that kind stupidity.
How much more expensive is it I wonder?
It’s a lot. At least 20%, perhaps up to 40% when you count all the onerous testing and labeling requirements. The regulators got their fangs in and won’t let go. Most people who buy weed have no use for such requirements. It’s fucking weed brab.
Interesting article I read in Superfreakonomics. Apparently, low-level drug dealers generally don’t make a lot of money selling drugs. The career path is similar to acting or banking. People get paid lousy when they first start in hopes that they’ll be one of the ones to make it up the greasy pole to where they can make a lot of money.
Depends on what your selling and how much you indulge in your own supply. Most low level pot dealers are selling just to have free smoke. Breaking even while keeping a fat bag on the ready, basically. More money for the harder drugs at the street level, especially after it’s been stepped on but a much higher risk of getting busted and dealing with maniacs on the regular. And of course, the real money is made by people who don’t use at all.
“Homeowner who fortified his mailbox with metal and concrete after repeated vandalism is sued by driver who was left paralyzed after crashing into it and flipping his truck in Ohio”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9712217/Homeowner-fortified-mailbox-concrete-vandalism-sued-paralyzed-driver.html
How else could he get his mail-in ballot?
Does that mean I can sue the utility company if I crash into a pole or the city if I hit a tree?
What if Neil Armstrong had fortified his mailbox?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9aIZnTsmfc
Shooting at “legos”. The spinning bullets was kinda neat.
Cool, but that guy has never heard of muzzle discipline, apparently.
Another Kinks Klassic
“The Washington Post has been branded ‘neoracist,’ and as promoting a ‘pseudoreligious movement’ for the latest episode of its podcast series urging readers to hold ‘white accountability groups’ and feel ‘deep shame’ over their race.
Its series, hosted by Nicole Ellis and called the New Normal, launched last spring, originally to discuss the coronavirus pandemic. The podcast shifted to conversations about race after the death of George Floyd last year.
New Normal’s latest episode, launched on Friday, discusses how white people can combat white supremacy, among them were forming so-called ‘white accountability groups.’
Washington Post is condemned for video urging Americans to set up ‘white accountability groups’ and force themselves into ‘a period of deep shame’ over their skin color
The video is the latest in a podcast series called The New Normal hosted by Nicole Ellis
It aired on Friday, and suggests white people segregate themselves into groups to discuss how white people have harmed people of color over history
One expert on the episode, Resmaa Manakem, suggests people take part in these groups for years before they can confront people of color
Trauma therapist Ilyse Kennedy said she took part in one such group and said it was important for white people to feel ‘a period of deep shame’
The episode faced backlash, with one saying the suggestions were akin to a ‘pseudoreligious movement’ and constituted ‘neoracism’
By Peter Belfiore For Dailymail.Com
Published: 02:28 EDT, 22 June 2021 | Updated: 08:34 EDT, 22 June 2021
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The Washington Post has been branded ‘neoracist,’ and as promoting a ‘pseudoreligious movement’ for the latest episode of its podcast series urging readers to hold ‘white accountability groups’ and feel ‘deep shame’ over their race.
Its series, hosted by Nicole Ellis and called the New Normal, launched last spring, originally to discuss the coronavirus pandemic. The podcast shifted to conversations about race after the death of George Floyd last year.
New Normal’s latest episode, launched on Friday, discusses how white people can combat white supremacy, among them were forming so-called ‘white accountability groups.’
‘An antiracist culture does not exist among white people,’ Trauma specialist and author Resmaa Manakem says introducing the concept. ‘White people need to start getting together specifically around race.’ ”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9711437/Washington-Post-condemned-video-urging-Americans-set-white-accountability-groups.html
Do you know who else were white people getting together around race?
Ironically enough white people will start getting together around race if this nonsense continues but the results won’t be what WaPo’s hoping for.
It’s so blatantly obvious that you have to believe that a white identitarian movement is what they want.
Maybe it is, it’d be an excellent excuse for the mother of all crackdowns.
The true believers among the “anti-racists” are degenerate Calvinists who think that if you ever espouse anything against them you were a heretic all along. So yes, they want to flush out anyone who opposes them, and they’ll turn the ratchet slowly but consistently to do so.
Crap, sorry about that. Edit fairy?
NASCAR?
Insert Standing Ovation GIF here.
I’m not sure what’s more frightening, the fact that people are either evil or stupid enough to push this lunacy, or the fact that people are dumb enough to give it credence. Either way, we are screwed.
Follow the science.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.yahoo.com/amphtml/scientist-waited-legitimize-lab-leak-162344951.html
I see that Peter Daszak is on his way to being thrown under the bus.
https://thepostmillennial.com/dr-peter-daszak-removed-from-medical-journals-covid-19-commission
Of course, all the people who either protected him or were too chickenshit to speak out are not going to face any repercussions.
LOL. This is a thing.
https://peterdaszak.com/
Are things really changing or are they just trading a compromised high profile guy for a compromised low profile guy?
Hell if I know. I’m going to stay with the most cynical interpretation of events possible until proven wrong.
#metoo
There’s no internal incentive for real change, so I’m going with the latter. But at a broader scale, external to them, respect for these institutions continues to fall.
What is the google dot com slash amp? Is that something that google is trying to “amplify,” or is it a way for people to try to tell google to “amplify” certain results?
I believe AMP is Google’s caching service for mobile web pages (mainly “news” or news-adjacent).
Youtube was actually a great help this morning. Front loader washer can be repaired with a $35 part, an entire afternoon and just twenty stitches! Fooking sheet metal. Just wait until I delve into the guts of the dishwasher… Judi’s away this weekend. If I can get the parts I know what I’m failing at!
Never do appliance work without kevlar gloves and sleeves on.
Fuck off slaver! 😉
Blood for the blood god!
/looks down at the chunk of nail that a zester took off of one of my fingers this weekend.
That’s living on the edge.
You’re not my supervisor!
Endeavor to persevere!
I replaced some parts on mine a year ago, and yeah, it was similar of an experience. My part cost $99 (the plastic seal for the front loader’s door), and I had to go through 3 different orders (thank god for returns) before finding the right one because the part numbers didn’t match, but I did take it apart and put the new ring in, and stop the serious leak problem (stupid kid left a pen in his pants and it put a hole through the thing) without having to replace a perfectly working high end front loader washer. I can attest to the sheet metal shit and the need for stitches (got only 5!)….
I have to interview someone this afternoon. Unfortunately for them I’m spending this morning fighting with Perl, which is putting me in a sour mood. I just want this thing to work, whycome perlites make their product so bad?
Because Perl is a tool of Satan.
Ze German vendor’s product is built on it.
I need to get the prerequisite modules running before we can even look at the main install.
Of course they use every esoteric and random module under the sun, with convoluted dependencies not on a vanilla install. So I’ve been chasing libraries.
Perl is great for some things. The problem is that people have tried to do everything with it.
Want to rip through text files and do stuff with it (using regex)? Perl is awesome!
I’ll also take the craziness of perl over the whitespace shit in Python.
But no matter what your feelings on perl and Python are, I think we can all agree that Java devs are the worse. Those guys really believe that everything should be written in Java and that is it.
I’ve seen bad code in every language, but Perl does have a certain tendency to attract the sort of code that has turned “clever” into a pejorative.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscated_Perl_Contest
I didn’t realize it ended twenty years ago.
It never ended; just nobody can figure out when the contest is being held anymore.
The first round of qualifyers is finding the contest.
It was no longer a niche.
Play some Perl golf.
I don’t know what that is.
Right now my brain is numb, I’m tired of staring at terminal windows, I need to move on to something else and come back.
Plus, the modules installed appear for root, but don’t show up for the individual users. 🙁
Note – I did check to make sure it was installing in /usr/local where it’s supposed to.
$ perl -V
What’s the default @INC? Is it the same for root and non-root users? Are there any paths in @INC that are not world-readable? Is $PERLLIB or $PERL5LIB set for either root or non-root users?
@INC covers the same directories for both. $PERLLIB and $PERL5LIB are set for the nonroot user, but are set to /usr/lib64/perl5:/usr/local/lib64perl5 – where the matterial is installed. those bariables are unset for root
If root can see the modules, presumably /usr/lib64/perl5 and /usr/local/lib64/perl5 are present in @INC. The last obvious suggestion I can make is check file/directory permissions to verify a badly-written makefile did not leave them readable only by root.
Perl is know for its many shortcuts lending to competitions to write code in as few characters as possible.
The new hot girl at the plant shaved her head bald over the weekend. I think she still looks quite fetching! Shame about the peacoat.
Does she keep asking about V’Ger?
She’s really attractive but I don’t believe that I’m her type. Not that it matters, anyway. Kinda direct, takes no shit, feet on the desk sort? I’m still strangely attracted to her. Photons are free.
Does the carpet match the drapes?
Probably. I heard that, at least in the US, pubic lice have been mostly eradicated due to people’s change in groinal grooming.
I read that public lice are proof that in addition to H. Neanderthalis, H. Sapiens made a habit of banging other primates.
Can confirm. Humans are somewhat unusual in having two species of specific lice; head and body (pubic.) The human pubic louse (Pthirus pubis) is closely related to the body louse specific to gorillas (Pthirus gorillae).
Think on that over your morning coffee.
The lowlands get a little lonely.
The highlands get a little too STEVE SMITHY!
What a lousy thought.
Don’t be such a crab.
Dudes. Check the eyebrows! My best friend from high school clued me in on that fact forty years ago. She was a she!
At least they didn’t tell ya to look at the underarm hair like some Euro chick once told me….
Is she Persis Khambatta?
Go balls deep in Titty Tuesday.
https://archive.li/cT0Te
How does union leadership survive that? No, I don’t just mean getting kicked out of the leadership slot – I mean how do they not get killed for that?
That’s get-sealed-in-a-55-gallon-barrel-and-dumped-in-a-large-body-of-water behavior.
We’ve become a nation of pussies.
We’ve become a nation of pussies.
Yesterday, somebody mentioned Jeremy Andrus and Traeger Grills. I knew nothing about him, so I Googled. I respectfully submit this piece of horseshit in the Harvard Business Review for consideration. Not for what it says directly, but for what you can read between the lines.
There’s plenty of non-pussies out there. They just get fired by MBAs who write self-glorifying thinkpieces in their business school journals about how “toxic” they were.
That reads like an Obama self-hagiography.
Pondering – could that be typed one-handed, or was it given as dictation and transcribed?
MBAs who write self-glorifying thinkpieces in their business school journals
Well, there are MBAs and there are MBAs. Generally, if you’re talking about an MBA where you’re actually learning some skill (e.g. finance, operations) you’re talking about a fundamentally different animal than an MBA where you’re mastering “soft skills” (otherwise known as how to BS).
The Pinkerton National Detective Agency has a sad.
Did they write up their case studies for the Harvard Business Review? I thought not.
Jesus… so this turkey buys into the company, and immediately wants to outsouce manufacturing, outsource distribution and shipping and ends up gutting the company by hiring his friends from his last company first, then moving everything down to where he just-so-happens to live, firing everyone who worked there before because they were “toxic”.
So in other words — he just wanted the IP portfolio and is fine slapping their logo on product someone else does all the actual work on. Modern American management model, ladies and gentlemen. Ugh.
I rather suspect the former majority owner he had to buy out was “hostile” because of crazy ideas like keeping manufacturing local and not supporting the Chinese state or whatnot… not “efficient” enough for Mr. Harvard Business School who is so proud of his time at a headphone company he lucked into joining at the right time.
Notice how he was not at all concerned about losing “tribal knowledge” when he outsourced manufacturing. Only when he moved HQ.
I mean, what could the people who actually make our product possibly know?
The guys who make the grills are just dudes in a metal fabrication shop. There’s not alot of repartee going on there. Trust me.
Next step–sell the company to ConHugeCo at a 20% premium and move on.
I’ve worked for that guy’s analogue before.
It used to be they would slick their hair back and wear suspenders. Now they disguise their tactics with new age consultant speak and casual attire.
Well that was an interesting rabbit hole; no not Andrus, CWAA. Traeger history and trying to figure out who owned the company when I bought mine – either right before or more likely after they sold to the Florida asshole, but before they outsourced to China.
The whole thing is a great lesson in how American business destroys itself.
That was me. I read that in HBR originally. HBR is Gellman Amensia. Several of the companies I’ve read about in there have been portrayed utterly wrong and then next page, huh, that’s different. The semi anonymous obfuscated names and companies in many articles are more convenient than Friedman’s taxi driver.
He’s pulled other crap too, like suing the actual Traegars for appearing in a pr photo announcing their hiring by a rival company.
My rant was triggered by the heavy advertising they’ve been doing to push their products.
What company are they working for now?
Dansons
https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/2020/08/19/lawsuits-traeger-pellet-grills-sttlement-stayton-silverton-salem-oregon/3369678001/
Thank you, sir.
Oh no. I now have only one free article left of the Harvard Business Review this month.
I skimmed that yesterday and immediately developed an intense dislike of that dude. I suspect there are some alternate takes on those events.
Olympic officials said Monday the summer games next month in Tokyo can have as many as 10,000 fans and they all must be from Japan, bringing clarity to whether the international competition will have spectators amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that the Tokyo Olympics will set records for losing money.
The authors explain that lockdown orders may have had lethal unintended consequences in their own right, such as increased drug overdoses, worsened mental health problems, increased child abuse, deadly delays in non-COVID medical care, and more. So, to find out whether stay-at-home orders truly helped more than they hurt, examining excess deaths, not just pandemic outcomes, is key.
Down the memory hole.
I can attest to the delayed medical treatment. It’s happening for me right now. My GP won’t allow visits. I nearly fell down the stairs two nights ago. The Canadian healthcare system is a cruel mistress.
They won’t see me until I literally fall down the stairs.
That really sucks. Maybe have Judi give you a few whacks with a broom and say you fell down the stairs.
Sorry Festus.
But if they did, it would be FREE!!! /Leftist
But seriously, I’ve tried explaining how the fabled “free” healthcare systems of Canada and Europe are not all sunshine and rainbows, and how people with cancer often die on a waiting list (because there’s no price system to motivate expanding the supply when it’s needed). The reply I always get is, “But at least they’re ON a list”.
I can attest to the delayed medical treatment. It’s happening for me right now. My GP won’t allow visits.
Are you assigned to a doctor by the state, or can you fire his weak goldbricking ass and see a different one?
They are all the same and it is exceedingly difficult to find a Family Doctor up here. I’m fucked.
You live in a prison colony.
That Traeger thing is interesting. Thanks, kbolino.
We spent a lot of time deciding whom to invite to move to Utah. By that point, after we’d closed the warehouse and trucking operations, we had about 90 employees in Oregon. We assessed each one on competency and cultural fit. We graded people as positive cultural leaders, neutral, or cultural detractors. If people were cultural detractors (and many were), it didn’t matter how competent they were—we didn’t want them. You’d think the detractors would be easy to identify, but that wasn’t always true. I remember one guy who worked in finance. I saw him as positive and upbeat, but when he left the company and did an exit interview with an external HR firm, I asked to see the transcript. I was shocked by how mean-spirited and negative he was.
If someone was a cultural neutral and highly skilled in a job that would be hard to fill, we invited him or her to move. Only a couple were cultural leaders, and we invited them too. Among the 90 people were perhaps 12 or 15 we hoped would come to Utah; of those, five or six actually made the move. In general, the people we wanted had worked at the company for only a few years. They were ambitious to develop their skills, hungry to be promoted, and capable of moving between roles easily. The longer-tenured employees weren’t adaptable and had too thoroughly assimilated to the negative culture. We thought about this in terms of a quarantine: We needed to be certain we didn’t bring anyone who could infect the new culture we were trying to create.
Groupthink, FTE!
Somebody sees himself as a savior sent down to enlighten the filthy proles.
So he got rid of all the older, more highly paid employees who won’t put up with a lot of C-suite bullshit, and replaced them with a bunch of younger weak-willed peons who have no sense of boundaries and will happily eat whatever shit management dumps on them. What a surprise.
I saw him as positive and upbeat, but when he left the company and did an exit interview with an external HR firm, I asked to see the transcript. I was shocked by how mean-spirited and negative he was.
Or you know, a professional who put on his game face at work and kept his opinions to himself instead of gossiping.
We’ve hired lots of people since we moved—we’re now at 450 employees globally—and I spend time with every candidate before he or she gets a job offer. I don’t focus on their résumés. I want to understand how they think about risk taking and what skills they want to develop. I try to ensure that we apply a tight cultural filter to anyone we hire. We want to find people who are already living by our values.
CEO-as-cult-leader- how lovely for him.
He is a real-life character out of Silicon Valley.
Sounds nightmarish.
People thought the majority owner was in charge? No wai! And why would you use “but” to connect those clauses in the last sentence?
why would you use “but” to connect those clauses
Because you’re not very bright?
Vegan and gluten-free of course. And the cost of those meals gets reported to the IRS as income no doubt.
But they charbroil the tofu!
I spend time with every candidate before he or she gets a job offer
If this is true (which I doubt), it means the CEO is spending its time on not-CEO shit.
That’s because he doesn’t know shit about what makes a good company.
He probably means senior level management hires. If that’s not what he means, he’s micromanaging the company culture to a degree Kim Jong Un probably would find stultifying.
Hmm. I read “every candidate” to mean “every candidate”.
Aside from the CEO part, that sounds a lot like hiring at Netflix. So glad I washed out of a first round interview.
CEO-as-cult-leader
My ex is working for Compass – a real estate brokerage masquerading as a tech play, and this is a perfect description of them. She is not of the body.
Too Local News Lazy Edition: Folks are lobbying to save the budget
Four days before the New Hampshire House votes on a $13.5 billion two-year state budget that’s being described by its supporters as “transformational” in its reduction of spending and provisions for conservative policies, the plan’s fate remains far from certain.
The GOP leadership of the House is expected to continue to try to negotiate with the conservative leadership of the New Hampshire House Freedom Caucus over the next several days – probably until the morning of the vote itself on Thursday.
In politics, especially New Hampshire State House politics, four days can be an eternity. But for now, the situation remains highly uncertain.
The state Senate will also vote on the budget Thursday, but it is expected to pass the package on a straight party line vote. The House is where the unpredictability lies.
WMUR reported Friday that Gov. Chris Sununu spoke for more than an hour – complete with a PowerPoint presentation – to the full House GOP caucus. He was joined by key members of his administration and a group of conservative supporters, including former New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien and his former chief of staff, Greg Moore, who is now state director of the conservative issues group Americans for Prosperity.
And why would you use “but” to connect those clauses in the last sentence?
Obviously, the HR department was insufficiently robust to force him to allow the fleas to run the circus. Tragic.
On one hand, they are the most racist country on the planet, thinking of their own citizens first before the entire rest of the world.
On the other hand, that means all the money spent there will be from their own country, negating ANY benefit they might get from hosting a global event.
I’m torn about what to feel about this….
Not entirely all. Surely coca Cola and McDonalds will be buying ads at the venues.
Oh yea, all the companies who “spoke out against systemic racism”. Guess we’ll get to see if they put their money where their mouth is. Surely, a company that cares so deeply about racial equality wouldn’t buy ads at an explicitly racist event just because there’s a ton of worldwide exposure, would they?
It’s not racist, it’s nationalist.
Nationalist = populist – Orange Man = KKK = Nazi = genocide = violence = White supremacy = systemic racism = Capitalism = “Democracy” (Not Republic) = Uncle Tom = APOCALYPSE!!!!!!!!!!
Why do you hate peoples of color?
Back to that guy from Traeger:
Who would ever have guessed a caring, enlightened guy like him would not-so-secretly view corporate employees as chattel slaves whose inmost thoughts should reasonably be subject to his control?
P Brooks has already broken this thread into so many pieces that all the king’s men can never put it back together again.
I love the commitment to not threading comments.
Every Monday morning we cook breakfast for the entire company, and we cook lunch together Tuesday through Friday.
On pellet stoves.
Muh CARBON FOOTPRINT!
So in other words — he just wanted the IP portfolio and is fine slapping their logo on product someone else does all the actual work on. Modern American management model, ladies and gentlemen. Ugh.
Juice the numbers, cash out, move on to the next “rescue” mission.
Of course, there is tremendous resistance to acknowledging the fact that the sacrifice we all, to varying extents, endured evidently accomplished nothing—and may have even left us worse off. But we must acknowledge and grapple with this painful truth to ward off similar mistakes in the future.
Stop it. You’re killing me.
That stupidly expensive front-loading washing machine just worked perfectly again. Imma go blow up LG’s headquarters complex.
Give it to em Festus!
I don’t want my kids to have to meet new people, so I’ll fire all those guys and relocate the company.
To the flesh-pots of Thailand?
I’m so woke, let’s get out of this blue shithole, move to Utah, and build a progressive utopia! Many woke, much brave.
Utah feels more and more like California each passing year. Complete with the noveau riche tacky bullshit stretching from Ogden down to Provo.
I’m sure. Montana wasn’t big enough for all the proggy locust swarm. The only way to stop them I guess is for them all to transition so they can’t pro-create. Either that or they all just become so stupid that they cease to exist.
In less than 2 decades, at the rate we are going, the USA will not be able to compete with most of the rest of the planet, in any way whatsoever. Paraguay will look like champions of industry compared to us. There will be nothing but the 3rd world poor and a few isolated boardrooms full of Harvard Business School graduates, sitting around trying to figure out what went wrong. Was it global warming or racism to blame?
Or it wasn’t real socialism. Preaching to the choir but this really needs to be repeated.
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
South Park CAN satirize this, and they did
Like the one comment said ‘South Park used to be parody. Now it’s a documentary’.
As did Futurama.
https://nypost.com/2021/06/21/joanne-linville-of-star-trek-and-twilight-zone-fame-dead-at-93/
RIP
Voice in the wilderness
The courage to stand up against prevailing winds is rare indeed, even for those who can afford to do so. To be sure, I knew plenty of economists who were against the lockdowns. They wrote articles and said so. It’s true that they were a tiny minority but they did exist. They also took enormous professional risks in daring to defy what quickly emerged as mainstream opinion.
I recall one interview with economist Gigi Foster in New South Wales in which she raised the problem of the costs. She was exceedingly reasonable. One interviewer asked her: “Why do you want people to die?” Another interviewer interrupted her and yelled: “Oh here we go with tradeoffs!” as if she had violated a taboo by daring to suggest that there was more to life than merely avoiding this one single pathogen, all freedoms be damned. Finally it was plainly said to her: “The debate is finished!”
Clearly the debate was not and is not finished. It’s just begun. We can look all over the world today and see enormous suffering inflicted by lockdowns while there is scant evidence at all that closures, masking, restrictions, stay-at-home orders, and hospital rationing achieved anything in the way of disease mitigation. And even if it had, do we not have a moral obligation to compare the results with the costs?
What you see now is many of the dissidents starting to speak out against lockdowns, expressing quiet regret, while the proponents seem gradually to be fading from the scene. One by one. Their Twitter feeds are ever more quiet. This is precisely what one would expect given the carnage all around us, and the complete failure of anyone to be able to demonstrate that they achieved their ends at less cost than alternatives.
Of all people, the economists should have known. If they did know, not enough spoke out. The whole scene reminds me of the Prohibition period during which all the leading economists stepped up to defend and rationalize the policy that everyone knew was on its way. It took more than ten years before it became stunningly obvious how goofed up was that opinion all along, that it completely failed to think through what economists are trained to think about, namely the relationship between means and ends and the tradeoffs involved in every policy decision.
Let us hope that it will not take ten years this time. Not only economists but also medical professionals and especially politicians need to step up and admit where they were wrong and work to make sure nothing like this is repeated again. If it does happen again, it should not happen with the blessing of economists, even if they have high-end positions at Ivy League universities.
Don’t bet on it.
This was pretty interesting, on the possible transformation of the Republican party into a more blue-collar base. I say possible because it isn’t at all clear to me that this is a done deal – the Republican leadership is beyond skilled in fucking up a winning formula.
The DNC is now the party of government and “minorities”. The RNC becomes they party of whites or it gets replaced by one.
It ain’t pretty but it is inevitable.
I don’t think it’s inevitable, at least the second part, “party of government” that is. Conservatives/libertarians/Republicans can make, and have made, inroads with ‘minorities’ and there’s no reason to expect that can’t continue. Uphill climb, just as selling/defending liberty always is, but I think it’s unfair to characterize ‘minorities’ as being inevitably Democrats, or locked into the same group as “party of government”.
Not inevitable, but I think its the way to bet, especially as the Dems get more aggressive with their racialism.
It’s worth pointing out here, that ‘whiteness’ as defined by the woke mob has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. Rather, ‘whiteness’ is having the learned behavior sets that allow a person to be successful in a market economy.
It’s the non-productive versus the less-non-productive.
It’s class, not race.
Oh no. I now have only one free article left of the Harvard Business Review this month.
Use it wisely, B P. Use it wisely.
I have a good friend who was bemoaning the fact that his company is once again going to trade shows and that he is charge of a booth for a show coming up soon.
He had been hoping that the Rona had killed off trade shows and he would no longer have to deal with them. No such luck.
We were talking about the fact that the trade shows rarely lead to new sales leads or other positive developments. They are just a huge time suck for the company.
I just remember a story from a friend of mine. A Chinese gentleman was asking my friend’s manager about a new process they were using and wondered how they did it. The manager replied “We have elves do it.”
Trade Shows are not about sales. They’re about schmoozing and putting entertainment on a corporate expense account.
Not for you plebs, mind you. Try to make sales.
Same as the big tech “events”. I had a boss come back talking about how awesome it was to go to the MS one in Atlanta (many years back), and they had a huge Guitar Hero set up and everything. Little was said about any actual improvements of technology.
I like tradeshows when they require no effort or input on my part.
I find other people’s tradeshows to be fascinating. Maybe my favorite so far is when my lawyer group shared a convention center with a funeral and mortuary trade show.
Plus, nobody at trade shows knows/cares if you are one of theirs, so you can harvest the giveaways.
*patent lawyer salivates and rubs hands together*
Our trade shows are an absolute boon for us. Wanna protect the most front of mind business valuable IP? Breeze through the booths at the trade show and introduce yourself to anybody you haven’t met before.
“We’ll pay you a lot of money if you spend a half hour documenting the coolest parts of this product and emailing them to me” usually gets a good response from the R&D folks.
Of course, we can never justify sending the patents team to the trade show. That would just be asinine. ?
We were talking about the fact that the trade shows rarely lead to new sales leads or other positive developments. They are just a huge time suck for the company.
I hear there’s big money to be made designing/fabricating display booths.
Also in abusing expense accounts.
Like everything else in Marketing, it’s impossible to prove and disprove.
Not for a while.
Signing off dear friends. Hope your day goes well as we career toward next Winter. Good tidings to all!
And this is pure genius…
Link failure
and that’s a 100% increase, isn’t it?
wait, I was thinking it went from 1 to 2, not 2 to 3…
well shit
Now sales tax is 5.3 – 7% depending on location.
8.025% in Minneapolis. Think we’re getting our money’s worth?
You only pay sales tax if you actually pay. You’ve had more free shopping events than we have.